The DirectX 12 Developer Blog has a special guest post from Stardock's Brad Wardell on DirectX and Ashes of the Singularity. 

"Ashes also uses a new type of 3D engine that is based on the hardware capabilities of modern PCs. For example, it doesn’t use deferred rendering but rather uses Object Space Rendering (OSR) which is similar to how CGI in movies have been rendered except we’re able to do it in real-time. While we are able to present

this on DirectX 11, with DirectX 12, we can support rendering vastly more objects on screen at the same time.

One of the reasons why games seem to always look like games and not CGI is due to the way a given scene is composited. That’s why our new engine uses OSR. That’s why even the relatively simple 3D models in Ashes look so distinctive. They look more like something you’d see in a CGI-style visual rather than a game."

Read the full article at the DirectX Developer Blog on MSDN.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/directx/archive/2015/10/27/ashes-of-the-singularity-makes-gaming-history-with-directx-12.aspx